Sex was not the problem; intimacy was. I was good at giving during sex, putting my focus on him and being beyond generous. Receiving was the issue, because in that position I was vulnerable. Giving put me in control, receiving was loss of control. When I felt safe enough with him to receive, a sense of nausea so unbearable hit me that he was never able to touch me again. A repulsion so great seized me that our marriage ended. Being as defenseless as a newborn baby in the presence of an unwavering, loving man had made me so ill that not only did I have to swallow my own puke, I lost twenty pounds. With Alejandro I had yet to learn that what lay at the bottom of the repulsion was self-loathing, for surely I was unworthy of receiving the unconditional love he was offering. The rapist had come into my life to prove that.
He started counting. For the second time in my short life, I had ten seconds to say goodbye to the world, the first having been before the mock firing squad in Chile. I thought it wouldn’t be enough, but it was, proving yet again that time and space are human constructs that exist on planet Earth only for measuring the immeasurable, for making finite that which is infinite.
When I was a child, my father asked me, “If there is an end to space and time, then what comes after?”
Infinity did indeed exist, and the proof lay in those ten seconds. Suspended in eternity, my entire life came into sharp focus. Flesh and bones fell away, and my spirit, free of all anchors, soared into the realm of memory. I conjured things that had happened, and things that were still to happen and now never would. I invoked my father’s Paihuano childhood stories, my first carnival in that enchanted valley of his birth, my mother and Bob in Bolivia right now, hiding MIRistas in their house, my baby brother Lalito, whom I would never see grow up for he had been born there the September before, after Ale and I had returned to Canada. I envisioned my uncle Boris, chain-smoking his Benson & Hedges and drinking his trusty Havana Club as he sat in front of the TV, gathering his energy to do his Sunday night janitor work. I visited my sister Ale, riding her purple banana-seat bike to the Lucky Dollar, just up the street from where we now lay, where she would buy Life Savers and her first Revello of the season; my cousin Gonzalo, roller skating in his blue-and-yellow-striped skates around the courts. Now I visited my abuelita Carmen in her house in Limache, Chile, where fall had just begun, snoring during the climax of Den of Wolves, the most popular soap opera on the air, my abuelito Armando gathering the eggs from the chicken coop, checking the ripeness of the avocados on the tree, their long bloodline of malnutrition and disease, both survivors of large broods of siblings who had not made it past childhood.
My spirit landed in the place where the then and now meet, where the here and there converge, and I imagined a young woman, me, who would join the MIR and fight to the end, taking Santiago in the back of a truck, rifle in right hand, left fist pumping the air on the day of the triumph. She would participate in the reconstruction of a socialist Chile, picking up where Allende had left off, but armed this time, armed in order to defend the hard-won achievements of the revolution. My spirit blasted through clocks and calendars, walls disintegrated, ceilings opened, and it entered the life of that future me, now a doctor, in a relationship with a fellow revolutionary (I still didn’t believe in marriage, but rather in companionship), offering my services all over the so-called Third World, giving my grain of sand so that no child would die of a curable disease, of hunger, ever again.
As the number ten grabbed my spirit by the nape and brought it back to my body lying next to Macarena’s, the here and now landed with the impact of a meteorite and my last thoughts were with someone a few blocks away, almost touchable, almost audible, almost smellable. Tommy, my Chancellor Boulevard boyfriend, wearing ironic polyester bowling pants bought at the Salvation Army (“They’re tacky!”), sitting in his white-shag-carpet rec room, practising the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” on his brand new drum set, facing the trampoline on the back of the lawn where fellow rich white boys who shopped at thrift stores as a fashion choice jumped in their bare feet. It was, after all, the first hot, sunny day of the year.
In the spring of 1995, one month after the parole hearing, I performed a five-minute playlet at a new works festival on Granville Island, Vancouver’s theatre hub. In the piece, part of a larger series of vignettes entitled Women and Fear, I recounted being wheeled through white corridors on a hospital gurney, the fluorescent lights flying by as a nurse held my hand and a police officer gave a plainclothes detective the location of the crime scene. This was my first attempt at creating a play about it, and as far as I was concerned, it was a failure, if only because the form was boring and the work was lacking in complexity. In it, I was a one-dimensional victim. The only salvageable thing about it was the structure: I did not disclose that I was at Emergency after being raped until the last beat of the play, and that realization elicited a gasp from the audience. Years would pass before my full-length play about the attack crystallized, after I’d chewed over ideas and images forever. I had discovered that I didn’t want to tell the story in a literal way, and had yet to learn how to create a piece of theatre, like the unforgettable Lima curfew play, that would do so through movement and non-linear text.
By the time I moved to Los Angeles in late 2002, I had a concept. After a decade of pondering concepts and themes, it materialized. A young tree lay on the stage. A man swung an axe over his head and brought it down, full force, right into the middle of the trunk. Every time the man brought the axe down, a young girl in a harness twirled in circles above his head, like water draining when the stopper is pulled, the laws of gravity reversed, the girl being swallowed up into a black hole of sorts, as opposed to down. The sound of the axe cutting through the air and landing on its mark, the grunt of the man every time he brought it down, the girl in the twirling harness, and the iambic pentameter of a heartbeat constituted the sound design. The lines “Don’t move. Don’t speak. Don’t breathe,” uttered by both the man and the girl, would echo throughout the play. The theme would be self-destruction, the title The Trigger.
“Don’t move. Don’t speak. Don’t breathe.”
Words spoken by the Paper Bag Rapist. Or had they boomed in my own head, my inner voice speaking them? Impossible to know. Impossible to remember. Yet those are the words that had always stayed with me when it came to the rape itself.
The endless ten seconds, a portal to the dimension where past, present, and future meet, had provided me with a framework to say goodbye to my bodily existence on earth. As he’d counted, I’d believed with every fibre of my mortal being that ten seconds later I’d be dead, and had hence taken the time to breathe in and taste the moist dirt that my face was jammed against, finding comfort in the certainty that my flesh, bones, brown skin, white skull, and green heart would join that earth, a universe all its own made up of the remains of millions of creatures that had lived and breathed full lives before me. A deafening roar like a wasps’ nest boomed in my ears when the counting was done, the ringing stretching through five more seconds of silence.
He let out an impatient sigh.
“I have one bullet left. I’m going to chop up your cousin now in front of you, starting from the feet. Then you’ll help me put the pieces in a plastic bag. Then I’ll shoot you.”
He kicked me in the calves to punctuate his last assertion. My young, vigorous heart imploded, as if the axe he spoke of had chopped right through my chest bone.
Macarena turned her face towards me. It was covered in snot, soil, and tears.
“Please. Do it for me.”
She mouthed the words. There was no breath behind them. Her eyes akin to the eyes in a photograph I’d seen of Jewish prisoners looking out from behind the barbed wire of a Nazi concentration camp. Nobody had ever looked at me that way, and I hope nobody ever does again.
“Okay. I’ll do it,” I informed the rapist.
My voice hadn’t trembled. It had not caught in my throat.
My surrender was absolute, as had been my conviction t
en seconds earlier that I would be murdered rather than raped. I looked the horror in the eye, even as he held the gun inches from my temple while I tied my white blouse around my face.
“How long will this take?” I asked him.
“Thirty seconds.”
He had just counted to ten. I decided I’d count to thirty. Not out loud, to myself.
It had occurred to me that I’d never thought much about the actual act of sex. At thirteen, I was too young for that, wrapped up in more abstract ideas of love. Penetration was never a part of my fantasies, nor was having my naked body grabbed and fondled. My daydreams revolved around kissing and hugging, staring into my beloved’s eyes, caressing each other’s hair, whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears, a la Sandy and Danny during their summer of love in Grease. I’d heard about lovemaking, and understood that it was the most pleasurable, intimate act that two human beings could experience with each other. But I’d never really thought about the nuts and bolts of the situation, the which-part-goes-where aspect of the act. And yet I was aware that the opposite of lovemaking—rape—would cause such unfathomable pain that I would rather have died.
Earlier that afternoon, upon meeting the Paper Bag Rapist, every goosebump on my skin had warned me that this time severe physical harm was inescapable. I steeled myself for it now, whatever it was, however it would feel. The belief that it would be worse than a bullet to the back of the head sent my body into a tailspin. I started to shake so hard he had to pin me down, the chattering of my teeth reverberating in my ears along with my galloping heart, the wasps’ nest full blast now.
“Don’t move. Don’t speak. Don’t breathe. Don’t move. Don’t speak. Don’t breathe. Don’t move. Don’t speak. Don’t breathe.”
The mantra reached me from afar, whispered as if by butterfly wings. He pulled the shirt off my mouth and stuck his tongue deep inside it. The force of the incantation matched the violence of his probing tongue.
I could hear my own voice now, pleading, despite my resolve to face the beast with head held high, to never beg this cruel human who now made a sport of pulling my trembling legs apart.
“Please. Please don’t. Please don’t.” I could hear my girl’s voice. It cried, it whimpered, it dropped to its knees and begged.
And then he sliced me clean in two, which is why I wondered if he’d used a knife.
My body went limp and my spirit rocketed out of the top of my head. Macarena, face in the dirt, bearing silent witness, stayed behind. Although we were only two feet away from each other, it was one of the loneliest moments of both our lives.
I wrote the first draft of The Trigger in Los Angeles in early 2003, as winter rolled in and I sat at the drafting table of my newly rented Los Feliz room. After directing an adaptation of Julio Cortázar’s End of the Game at my Vancouver alma mater in the autumn of 2002, I’d closed up shop and driven south for the second time in six months, moving to the City of Angels. I’d taken the Mount Shasta curves, in northern California, to the beat of Astor Piazzolla and Nestor Marconi’s modern tango and Lito Vitale’s virtuosic piano, the score for the play I’d just directed. Within two days of my arrival, my landlord, a flamboyant, closeted, fundamentalist Christian ex–movie director in his fifties who ran a small theatre company in Hollywood, not only rented me a room ten minutes after meeting me, he also cast me in one of the one-acts he was producing.
The dead of night saw me hammering out The Trigger, and days had me pounding the pavement for an agent along with a Canadian actor friend. Weekends found me carrying on with a mid-twenties Palestinian jeweller I’d met on Venice Beach who was a survivor of an Israeli prison. Picked up at the age of thirteen for throwing stones at Israeli tanks during the First Intifada, he’d been released at eighteen. He’d been severely tortured, and when he reunited with the girlfriend he hadn’t seen for five years, he learned that she too had been in jail and that her nipples had been cut off. A teenaged brother had been shot dead in the street by the Israelis. Like so many oppressed people with zero sense of entitlement, his outlook on life remained inspiringly positive, stating that being a political prisoner for his entire adolescence had in fact been a gift, because he had spent his time reading and discussing books with the Palestinian intelligentsia he was in jail with.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better education. And it was free.”
When the Second Intifada began in 2000, his parents, fearing that this time he’d be killed, had smuggled him out of Gaza and sent him to live with wealthy relatives in Los Angeles. This intifada was still going strong, and he’d recently learned that another brother had been murdered. Upon his arrival in Los Angeles, his relatives had filled out all the sponsorship papers to get him a work permit and then a green card. It had all been about to go through, but then 9/11 happened in 2001, and hundreds of men were still being arrested across the country for the crime of being brown, Middle Eastern, and Muslim. US immigration denied his papers. Now he was undocumented.
We’d walk the Venice Beach canals together, watch the sun set on the ocean, dance salsa at El Floridita Cuban restaurant in Hollywood, ride the Sea Dragon at the Santa Monica Pier, all while discussing Palestinian, Chilean, and world politics—in all of which, due to his prison education, he was a master. Our short-lived relationship ended when an American woman in solidarity with the Palestinian cause offered to marry him so he could stay in the country, but we remained friends for years.
I forged friendships that would prove to last a lifetime in those first few months in LA. I attended the 100,000-strong marches along Sunset Boulevard against the United States’ imminent invasion of Iraq, cheering along with the others when Martin Sheen, who played the president on the popular TV show The West Wing, took the stage and yelled, “Make love not war!” More celebrities condemned the looming invasion at subsequent rallies, and seemingly every documented progressive Angeleno took to the streets.
In Vancouver, regular seawall walks had fed my writing. In Los Angeles, when not strolling the Malibu beaches, where I laughed with joy at the jumping pods of dolphins and at the sight of a playful grey whale close to shore once, or people-watching at an outdoor Venice café, I’d walk the Latino quarters, devouring that concrete jungle with all my senses heightened. Santee Alley, in the heart of the downtown garment district, was a favourite, as was Broadway, studded with Latino jewellery stores. Both were within walking distance, and provided for an afternoon of serious sensory overload. Once, I found the entrance to one of Broadway’s many old buildings and took the stairs up, desperately seeking a bathroom, and came across sweatshops where Latinos laboured in cramped rooms, hunched over sewing machines next to mountains of clothes, their bosses monitoring their every move.
A skinny teenaged boy with fear and determination in his eyes stood at one of the doorways. He told me he’d just arrived on foot from Guatemala and was hoping to get a job. Someone had also informed him that there might be food on these floors. I handed him a twenty, wished him the best, climbed back down the stairs, held my pee, and continued down Broadway, a knot forming in my throat at the knowledge that I was no longer part of a movement to change all this, a wave of guilt and longing washing through me at the constant reminder that I was perhaps a sellout for not only following my selfish dream but letting it take me to the heart of the empire.
I let the self-loathing wash over me, exhaling as I passed windows displaying kilos of silver, gold, and precious stones in the form of Guadalupes, crosses, Marys, Christs, anchors, nameplates, quinceañera rings, rosaries, rope chains, and bamboo hoop earrings of every size. Cumbias blasted from speakers, taco stands proliferated. Botánica shops sold sex-life-enhancing phallus candles, “Curse Breaker,” “Come to Me,” and “Lucky Casino” herbs and potions, 7 African Powers bath salts, red La Santísima Muerte votive candles with images of the Grim Reaper on them, and Fasten Your Man candles featuring men wearing only underpants on all fours with chains around their necks, lit by women who wanted to keep their men
by their side. Lineups formed under signs reading We wire money to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador for less. El Salvador’s economy would have collapsed if not for the remittances sent from the States, where the vast majority of Latino labourers sent a good portion of their pay back home.
Shortly after my move to LA, a spur-of-the-moment phone call from my Chicano scholar friends found me back in San Diego for the first time since I’d lived there, to watch the Mexican Elvis, El Vez. The concert happened in a bar under a bridge in the seedy part of town, and when El Vez came on with his backup singers Las Elvettes, paid tribute to the Zapatistas, and planted a kiss right on my first-row mouth, I knew I was home yet again. He played all my favourites, such as “Lordy Miss Lupe” and “Never Been to Spain.” On our drive back to LA, I was flooded by bittersweet memories of my first North American friend, Lassie, her dying-of-homesickness Mexican maid, my parents’ dignity in the face of hardship, the drive away from an undocumented future in the baby-blue Chevrolet Malibu with Barry White’s “Love’s Theme” playing on the radio, so far north up the coast that we would find ourselves in a temperate rainforest that mirrored the Patagonian one we’d just fled. Now my scholar friends and I passed yellow warning signs featuring drawings of families running across the freeway, with the word Caution. I shook my head, El Vez’s kiss imprinted on my lips.
Although I found an acting agent and a writing management team who set up meetings with a Paramount producer looking for a Latina to write a romantic comedy (I decided mine would be called Cojones or Bust and would feature a strong, powerful Latina who comes undone for the wrong man), and I was meeting regularly with the folks at the Center Theatre Group (they eventually produced a staged reading of The Refugee Hotel as part of their New Works Festival), I ended up moving back to Canada in the late summer of that year, 2003. The reason was the same one that had had us driving away at the beginning of exile: I had no papers. Upon my arrival I had hired an immigration lawyer to start the green card process, and had even found a sponsor. A work permit would be ready within nine months. But three months after my arrival, the US invaded Iraq and my lawyer informed me that the process could be delayed by up to two years. I’d come with savings to take me through the first six months, and prayed that a work permit would be expedited once I was offered a part or a writing job. A pipe dream, perhaps, but many foreign actors and screenwriters in Los Angeles had got their permits that way, including some I knew. Paramount’s interest in my screenplay held promise, but it had not led to a concrete offer in the short time I was there. I was disappointed, but the friendships and work relationships I forged would remain strong, and I would return for visits, and even work, on a regular basis.
Mexican Hooker #1 Page 19
